Building on the Biodiversity Legacy of David Attenborough: A Proposal for Integrating Natural History Media into Socio-Ecological Data Infrastructures

Evolving scenario of biodiversity knowledge is characterised by a core contradiction: the most visible global representations of nature are produced by a handful of natural history media institutions, while the most granular and historically grounded records of socio-ecological change remain dispersed across local archives, Indigenous knowledge systems, governance documents, and scientific databases. While the filmography of Sir David Attenborough has become one of the primary ways global publics encounter biodiversity, ecosystems, and planetary change, this contradiction in biodiversity knowledge creates an implicit tension. This article attempts to problematise this feature as a means of linking complex human histories, resource conflicts, and governance regimes that structure the filmed landscapes to the corpus of work left behind by Attenborough.